Gustave Dore’s etching for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Plate 22: They all uprose; picture via http://dore.artpassions.net/ .
“The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yen now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the moon
The dead men gave a groan.
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on,
Yet never a breeze up-blew;
The mariners all’gan work the ropes
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools -
We were a ghastly crew.”
- lines 327 to 340 of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
What’s to be said that doesn’t take away from the image and poem? Dore was an amazing artist who complimented and enriched the work of masters and masterpieces. We also have Coleridge to thank (or bemoan) for Iron Maiden’s co-opting of this poem.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s death mask (via http://www.undyingfaces.com/info/page/3/)
“In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an experiment; and this experiment we will suppose to have failed. Yet even in these poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tendency of the poet’s mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions.”
- S.T. Coleridge on his former friend, William Wordsworth in his chapter, “Defects of Wordsworth’s Poetry” in his Biographia Literaria.
Coleridge’s falling out with Wordsworth had to do with Wordsworth publishing Lyrical Ballads with only his name attached and removing many of Coleridge’s poetic contributions. Also, Coleridge was becoming less stable and more addicted to opium and wasn’t able to function in society very well.
The IMAGINATION, then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On the Imagination, or esemplastic power” in his Biographia Literaria
what I gather he means:
The primary imagination doesn’t belong to us (humans); it is the act of creation, linked to the divine creative act.
The secondary is an act of creation by humans.
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